No abstract

Form (to be modified as applicable and signed copy attached with the manuscript) I/we hereby certify that I/we have participated sufficiently in the intellectual content, conception and design of this work or the analysis and interpretation of the data as well as the writing of the manuscript, to take public responsibility for it and have agreed to have our name listed as a contributor. I / we believe the manuscript represents valid work. Each author confirms they meet the criteria for authorship as established by the ICMJE. Neither this manuscript nor one with substantially similar content under my/our authorship has been published or is being considered for publication elsewhere, except as described in the covering letter. I/we certify that all the data collected during the study is presented in this manuscript and no data from the study has been or will be published separately. I/we give the rights to the corresponding author to make necessary changes as per the request of the Journal, do the rest of the corresponding on our behalf and will act as the guarantor for the manuscript on our behalf. The article will be publish under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.

Thermal and ablative performance of alumina-modified carbon phenolic composites has been experimentally investigated. Pristine, 2, 4, and 6wt.% alumina particles modified composites were fabricated by hand layup followed by vacuum bagging process. Linear ablation rate was determined by the oxyacetylene flame test whereas thermogravimetric analysis determined thermal stability. Furthermore, SEM and EDS were done on ablated samples for morphological and elemental analysis whereas to determine individual phases, XRD was done. It was found that the addition of alumina initially at 2wt.% enhanced the ablation resistance but with further increase in the concentration of alumina above 2wt.%, ablation resistance decreased. Thermogravimetric analysis found that char yield of alumina-modified composites increased with an increase in alumina concentration.